Monthly Archives: April 2015

Two postcards arrived in the mail this week that turned me around and blew me away. One, a black & white notification for renewal of our post office box. And the other, an illustrated reminder of the San Juan Artists’ Studio Tour, coming up June 6 & 7, an event we attended last year. Can it be we will have been here a year?

What started as a spontaneous decision, i.e. “Let’s move to the islands!” has taken a year to implement.

Our daughters are the adults now. They are working and commuting and making plans for the future. They are growing their careers, while we are growing spring salad greens and arugula. These are their globe-trotting days, while we are walking everywhere. Indeed, my husband is a trekker.

Now we are the ones mucking around in the waters and digging in the sand. Assembling Adirondack chairs like so many tinker toys, and building bonfires as if we were at camp. Taking all our cues from nature.

Talking to the attentive deer of the forest, assuring them they are safe. Going ecstatic over waterfowl. Gray herons, gulls at play, soaring eagles. The slow turning of the seasons, the eruption of spring. The racket of crickets in tall grasses and frogs mating in marshes. The fox who congregate on the beach to yip at full moons, we are listening to you all. We see the sun come up each morning and wake each other if it’s particularly beautiful, and watch it set.

One million Mary Oliver moments in each day, that is why I live here.

“Life doesn’t go in a straight line, it goes in a circle,” notes my father at 91 years of age.

Full circle is what I feel when the ferry arrives in port in Friday Harbor. Walk-on passengers move to the bow of the boat with their bags, bikes and children. Cars follow at a distance, driving at a pedestrian pace, climbing the shining village on the hill.